Letters to the editor: RTW hurts the middle class

I just read the March 10 column on “Right-to-work” by Craig Farrand in The Daily Tribune. I hope many more residents get to read it, too. I’m a fairly conservative guy who works as a nurse for the Department of Corrections. We are a unionized staff who for the past year, had to endure the hardship of watching the Republicans attempt to privatize the workforce and essentially eliminating our jobs.

Most of us felt it was an attempt to weaken the Democrats even more by eliminating union contributions. We were beyond surprised and relieved when they told us they weren’t going to privatize us because they couldn’t lower the costs to they had hoped for.

I thank you for the clear article on the RTW issue and I hope people take a good look at the Republican agenda, especially their treatment of the vanishing middle class.

TOM HILL

Ferndale

Civil rights accomplished

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As a nation, we should pat ourselves on our back, or perhaps say as we do in my native Israel, “Kol Hakavod,” for the incredible distance we have come from Dec. 1, 1955, when in Montgomery, Ala., a young African–American seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man and was arrested for it. That sparked a long bus boycott, an event that proved iconic in the history of the civil rights in our nation.

On Feb. 27, 2013, a beautiful statue of her was unveiled in the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Congress, among statues of past presidents. It was a great honor that was so deserving.

My late husband, Shelly, who grew up in San Antonio, remembered as a child separate water fountains for whites and blacks and other remnants of Jim Crow laws that still existed in the late 1940s.

A few years ago, we took our granddaughter, Kayla, to the Henry Ford Museum and sat in the bus where Rosa Parks made history. This pre-teen was incredulous, disturbed and totally unaware of the story of discrimination. Needless to say, in the years since then, she learned in school and independently read of the shameful history of discrimination, something her grandfather witnessed in his own lifetime.

In no more than two generations, our nation would have an African-American family living in the White House and the statue of an African-American woman gracing the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Congress among the nations’ greats.

As we say in our Jewish tradition: Shehecheyanu, a blessing of thanksgiving.